Many People Love NASCAR

NASCAR is one of the most popular sports around and they all need a great place to talk about it. Since my Wife and I both love NASCAR, it shouldn’t be too hard for us to be regular participants. A forum that the owner doesn’t care about is doomed from the beginning. You never know, someday all of the members may meet at the races on a regular basis.

Great Software: vBulletin 3.7 beta 4

The site is running the newest beta of vBulletin. This new version of vBulletin has allowed me to remove many of the 3rd party hacks that I normally install in my forums. I believe this software gives me at least one advantage over the big dogs like NASCAR.com. With every NASCAR fan on the net (including myself) going to NASCAR.com on a regular basis, I need all the help I can get.

Time

I have all the time in the world. I am going to keep the site going just because I like it. Whether the site takes a month or ten years to get going, it doesn’t matter to me. I think I can get this site going and I think it’s going to take time.

That’s just a little update on NASCAR-Forums.net. If you like NASCAR stop by and say hello sometime. It really is a great place to talk NASCAR.

Family

My wife and I had our second daughter, Layla. Ah…yes…huge change, but definitely for the better. Layla and our first daughter Maggie are the greatest thing that ever happen to us, but it forced us to change.

We realized that California was no longer a viable option. We made the decision to move back to my home state of Wisconsin. With my parents still in Wisconsin, we would be close to family. We thought long and hard about moving to my wifes home state of New York, but it was just too expensive in the long run.

Employment
Moving away from the place we had been for 9 years meant getting a new job for the first time in a long time. My wife and I both worked for the same company in California. The owners were great to us, so leaving to a new job was a very difficult decision.

Fortunately, I found a great new company to work for. My wife will be working with me again as soon as we find a nanny. Currently she is the power behind the day to day operations of our online gymnastics pro-shop. If you have forgotten, my wife and I are a husband and wife team of gymnastics coaches.

Real Estate

One of the tough parts of 2007 was the realization that we were going to have a hard time selling or even renting our California condo. Right now we are still in the process of trying to rent (or sell) our condo. As soon as this major road block is out of the way, we’ll be on our way to financial freedom.

Websites

J.B.Slife dot Com - I am always trying new things online.  I tried starting a blog…this one.  I ended up letting it sit for quite some time due to all the changes.  Hopefully I can get it going again, I have lots to talk about.

LeotardCrazy.com - Leotard Crazy, my gymnastics pro-shop, did about $5ok in sales in 2006.  I’m happy to say that we hit $90k in 2007.  I’d love to go into detail about how Leotard Crazy increased by 80%, but that’s for another post.

The Chalk Bucket - My gymnastics forum, The Chalk Bucket, grew greatly also.  It went from under 100 members to over 1000 members.  Currently about 15% of the members are active in any given week.  I am positive that The Chalk Bucket will grow to be one of the largest gymnastics communities on the net by the time the 2008 Olympics are over.

Summary

Everything changed for the better in 2007.  My family and I are currently living in the small town of Hartland, WI.  I found a great job with a great little coffee shop on the way to work.  When we finally get rid of our California condo, we will look at buying a house in Wisconsin.

Now that I have a couple successful websites, I look forward to repeating that success on new websites.

Thanks,

JBSlife

Later…I have to finish drinking my eggnog.

Check out County Music Forums, the newest country music forum on the net.

I originally started this site because I was inspired by John Chow. Of course that means that I started this site to make money. My plan was to share my secrets with the world and make a good amount of money doing it. It’s been a couple of months and I’ve only made a couple of dollars, time to refocus.

The content of the blog will still be exactly the same, “eCommerce, Forums, Blogs, BBQ & Beer”. My main goal will now be building content. If enough people find me interesting, then I’ll start adding some of the ads back in. As they always say, “Content is King”.

For the time being, check out this post about the update at the Google Analytics Blog.

I did notice a AdSense tool that I really liked. It shows how many times your ads displayed at certain positions. This could certainly come in handy for people that count on AdSense for traffic and sales.

I’ll see if I can do a little better review of it tomorrow after I’ve had some sleep.

Later,

JBSlife

EDIT: I’ve had a problem finding a use for the service. Integrating it into the sites is easy. Sorry for the confusion.

Why not just use YouTube?

YouTube is obviously the video giant, but they don’t pay you to publish the videos on your site. Revver ads an advertisement at the end of each video, if the ad is clicked you get money. The ad money is split 40% to the video creator, 40% to Revver, and 20% to YOU (the publisher).

The Revver Issue

The only problem with Revver is the amount of videos in there network. At The Chalk Bucket, my gymnastics forum, we post videos all the time. YouTube is a virtual gold mine of gymnastics videos. If we could somehow make money off of all these videos, we would be golden. I would love to start using Revver a bit more, but there are only a few gymnastics videos on Revver.

At the time of this post, 83 videos were tagged with “gymnastics” on Revver. Compare this with the 27,500 on YouTube. To make matters worse, over 50% of the “gymnastics” tagged Revver videos are uploaded by 2 members. Both of these members videos are completely useless.

This post is really just an excuse for me to give Revver a shot. Let me know what you think. Does anyone make any money with Revver on their sites?

Later,

JBSlife

Now I just have to go through it add some of my key modules back in. Hopefully I can finish that up over the next couple of weeks like I had originally said. Beyond that, the forum is ready to go. Join today and help me start adding some content. Don’t forget to tell your friends.

Blah…Country Theme

A Little Taste of the New Style

The new skin is not ready yet, but I should have the main portion of it completed in a week or so. The new skin is a little more my style.